[...]between text and world

*bird's-eye=?/!~navigational~/?=.'<-phenomenological
[...in front of the open (blank) page (of the book) (we teach children to take the) position of the industrialist, the urban planner, or the Cartesian philosopher --> outside the page is outside and inside the page is inside ]@Eunkyung's scriptural enterprise --> Derridean proper space of writing
-the panopticon as observing instrument for human sciences is embeded in the page of the book we open. part of this tradition =/= first person shooter

(Ihde on) game-bodies: (on multistability -->) ‘modes of navigation’ [macro phenomenological conditions, modeling observational possibilities, ]:
[1]- third person (pretended) overhead view looking down a map-like world and plotting your course, one says “I go to X.” he calls it “the reading position” (usually a western navigator) --> using instrumental mediations to translate this (overhead) position, star patterns are with the north star
[2]- first person shooter, take your body as stable position, one says: “X is coming to me.” (usually a south pacific navigator) --> reading phenomena as instruments, dynamic motion of star patterns are without the north star
[3]-



every major culture/civilization watches the *movements of heaven*
technologies of temporality, lunar calendars (mostly migratory or non-agricultural people who were into smaller cycles) and solar calendars (people who were into lager cycles), knowledge of repeated patterns of environmental phenomena
from stonehenge [= stabilizer of perception, #stone telling the movement of heavens;] to chip (, devices to record cycles) --> the technoscience has changed (phenomenologically merely) in scale
[*] science is always science-mediated-through-instrument [--> regarding ajayeb: #model is the principal instrument of (modern) science.]---> am I in which model-shift? (how? and why?):
•idealized models [~-> my “art"] (<--)to--> heuristic models [~-> my lectures] ?
•computational models [~-> my CG period] (<--)to--> phenomenological models [~-> my ajayeb] ?
•fantasy models [~-> my ?] (<--)to--> theoretical models ?
•representational models [~= my images?] (<--)to--> epistemological models ?
[*]

...................................

like the blind man's cane or probe, means through which the environment is perceived and acted on, how is the 3D computer simulations an embodiment relation? what are the (dis)embodied habituations of the hacker? ==> philosophy of action : how 3D work as an (dis)embodied artifact change our relation to the world? or, which world is experienced as perceived through embodied artifact of the 3D?
•representations of the location
•question of orientation
--> epistemological studies of scientific instrumentation

(Feenberg, passivity missing in Ihde)
(my own interest in shyness and the) passive dimensions of body--lived experience of being the object of action***

Feenberg (reflecting on medical situations forward:) we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others
dependent body --> highly technologized experience

instrumentalized status of modernism, in which the ‘dependent body’ belongs to childhood
purified “humans” : the subject distinguished from its instrumentalities

sex: construction of the dependent subjectivized bodies
(Sartre & Merleau-Ponty:) person becomes a thing in the world of the other

lived-body =/= body [--> also the concern of Irigaray and Butler]
(this is Husserl's Körper and Leib)
~ machine-infused neuro-physical body
◦kinaesthetic sensations
◦presentational sensations
◦“internal” perception
◦“subject” -body
◦organ of perception / organ of action /
--> (identity of the ego -->) the (existentialist visualist and strange) idea of: “I am my body"--body in terms of “I can” ==> self-movement
(intra-action =/= that sensations are freestanding complexes and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and studied “before” the action)
*perception (is an act:) “animating” the data of sensation (?)

the extended body signifies itself through [=/= acts through] the technical mediation

the impersonal and atomizing (commonplace) associations with the notion of disembodiment --> the idea that in online involvement relations are abridged and trivialized, that there is a lack of commitment and risk, and moral engagement is impossible, and so on.

*what would be a situated account of the (lived-)body in CG?

“the ringing of the cell phone that embarrasses us in the middle of a lecture” --> extended body

plasticity and polymorphism of our bodies (online) [Ihde]

programmers working in other programmers’ works (--not imaginative engagement with the other, rather) --through--> interfaces and folds in interpretation {tutorial voices, screen videos, scripts, help files, layers of codes and tools on each other, nested folders on one's own computer, named categories by oneself, horde of text files and renders, etc}--> these are (en-/de-)crypting extended bodies constructed of language
subjectively constructed phenomenon of the communed fold interpreted : the 3D computer programm
(=/= romantic refusal of all mediation)

-what is the nature of the technology involved in CG?

•what is the source of the somatic sense of place, if not the body (since Greeks) and animality (since Deleuze + Guattari), in the case of CG? --?-->{the way a good farmer will pick up soil and feel the dirt in his hands}
(Greek word) ‘soma’ refers to a corpse (in Homer,) not a living body (--> #lived-body)
Neither the living body as an entity nor the Mind as an entity had a name.
for Aristotle, ‘thinking’ part of the soul, had an existence from any connection to the body.
“to experience the world is the very nature of body inside out.” (Christian Hubert > John Schumacher)


a community whose members are aware of each others’ passive presence is different forms
(active =/= present)

these are issues of social subject in a technically mediated world

to look at CG embodiment relations:
•fold (Ihde)
•skill (Merleau-Ponty)
•theory of affordance (Gibson)
•intra-action (Barad)
•detour (Latour)

(Merleau-Ponty's) ‘body schema’ : space of the body = 'space of situation,’ orientation towards possible (not only existing) tasks ==> aspects of the external/virtual world
body understood in terms of their ability to enter into one's projects =/= spatial location
[what is the body schema of the hacker in CG? (an external world where there is no near or far.) what is experienced as their Gestalt? which grasp is automatically localized? what are their phantom limbs? ==> body immediately known to self]


(body as the) system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal “place” defined by its task and situation. “My body is wherever there is something to be done.”

kinaestheses, proprioception,

...................................

what ‘play’ does to ‘ego’?

...................................

([is for Lilia (? like Wittgenstein) all ‘certainties'] grounded in the) certainty of the body
{pain <--> certainty}--> trauma + memory

...................................

(Christian Hubert > ) Rudofsky “unfashionable human body” (#veil)

Thomas Friedman “The Golden Straitjacket”
•political-economic garment of globalization era --> Straitjacket
(Cold War era:)
•Mao --> suit
•Nehru --> jacket
•Russian --> fur
•
•Islam --> hejab

(Tasavof-->{for which the body does not remain concrete and material, and soul is ambiguous and polymorphic}, Pythagorean:) veli: soul can clothe itself in different bodies =/= (Aristotle:) soul is the form of a particular living body { soul = organization of the body }--> “..there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted on without involving the body” =/= (Descartes:) soul = enlightened machine (~=? proper organization of the brain)


***The body is a special image --> body image

body, the priveleged image, the world of consiousness (through self-reference), the brain's primary frame of reference [-constructed with libidinal intensity? --> a map of narcissistic investment] (=/= body without organs)
•condition of the subject's access to spatiality (of the [numero-computationally?] built environment)
•anatomy is always “imaginary anatomy”
•the (body-)ego is a formation of body image through primary narcissim (in terms of Oedipus complex)
•body image also incorporate external objects (implements and instruments --> intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body) ~--> the “detachable” parts of the body: urine, faeces, saliva, sperm, blood, vomit, hair, nails, skin--all retain something of the cathexis and value of a body

-for Bergson: an image that one know from within by affections, rather than from without by perceptions: body }==> “my body” is the center of actions ==births==> representation
-for Whitehead: “self-knowledge of our bodily event” ==> (organic) conception of nature
-masculinity: body subordinate to the mind ~=>{ body: site for feminist critique
-for contemporary feminism (Grosz): body is neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between physical, symbolic, and material conditions

the ideological representations of a “real” precultural body
[--> idealized in terms of abstract geometry, rendered primal in primates,,,]

“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” Merleau-Ponty

(in his studies on body, Christian Hubert quotes John Schumacher quoting) James Gibson: “The optical information to specify the self, including the head, body, arms, and hands, accompanies the optical information to specify the environment. The two sources of information coexist. The one could not exist without the other. When a man sees the world, he sees his nose at the same time; or rather, the world and his nose are both specified and his awareness can shift....The supposedly separate realms of the subjective and objective are actually only poles of attention.” (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception)


sensuality is co-making


rituals and technologies are links between bodies and societies
(social) techniques for the inscription of locality into bodies
technology as an exteriorization of the functions of the body?

CG stands for:
•computer graphics
•computer games
•creature generator
•categorial grammar --> “==>”, “=/=”, etc
•conceptual graphs --> graph-based knowledge representation and reasoning model
•computational geometry --> geo-info-sys design
•*computational gesture* --> extracorporeal material culture
•
•(complete governance, chaotic God, commanding general, common ground, center of gravity,)
•

the well-equipped invalid (--> embodiment, Virilio)

(Foucault's radical exploration of:) body = (subject to the effects of) rhetoric of technical reason
techniques of punishment (, a “political technology”) : “an art of unbearable sensations” --to--> “an economy of suspended rights”

Deleuze and Guattari: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body...” (what are the affects of the CG bodies?)
-for them the “body” is a discontinuous and non-totalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities and durations, a surface of intensities: *pure simulacra without originals*


erotogenic zones, sexuality, Freud, auto-erotic internalization, clinamen

(the formally female cyborg / techno-monster of the Ghost in the Shell:) the (masculinist) fantasy of leaving the body behind and reconstituting it as a a technical object under human control as both a desire for perfect knowledge and total power and at the same time as a way of escape... [Christian Hubert] #Haraway
•the question of the “soul” is read as the question of (certain technology of) power over bodiess

(traits of) cyborg:
1. boundary transgression
2. the recognition and re-scripting of myth
3. simulations of identity
4. coalitions of affinity


reembodiment of intelligence


Hubert > Serres: “My body (I cannot help it) is not plunged into a single, specified space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses, and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another; hears and communicates in a third; and so forth, as far as one wishes to go. Euclidean space was chosen in our work-oriented cultures because it is the space of work--of the mason, the surveyor, or the architect. [...] My body lives in as many spaces as the society, the group, or the collectivity have formed: the Euclidean house, the street and its network, the open and closed garden, the church or the enclosed spaces of the sacred, the school and its spatial varieties containing fixed points, and the complex ensemble of flow-charts, those of language, of the factory, of the family, of the political party, and so forth. Consequently my body is not plunged into one space but into the intersection or the junctions of this multiplicity.” (Hermes, pp 44-45) (@Aela)

...................................

(feminist open-source --✕-->?) I am actually coming from a masculinist closed-source culture-thing, that is to say, my background is in masculinist black-boxed concepts of being and beyond, that means i have a different relationship with interference and parasitism
•how and when a concept becomes black-boxed? by which processes?
@Sven: what matters is the input/output, stimulus/response [--> “black-box of the beyond” (#zolmat writing)] --> transfer characteristics, data-flow, the ontology of the “internal working” : “open” exchanges inforamtion about its interactions }--> open-source is part of the tradition of anthropocene system thinking: network synthesis, system engineering, theory of the organism, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, and world system perspective

...................................

what are the nodes of energy in interdigitalities intra-actions in human-machine relations?

***we are belonging to a set of cultures that regularly believes in the idiom of: organism =/= technology
--> this little ontological dichotomous device is doing serious worldings, making and destroying worlds

technologies of descriptive practices
technology is descriptive practice
technology: anything describable as a technology --> idiom اصطلاح

...................................

[title]
age of stone, and stories for computers

...................................

(#workshop in Stuttgart 11.04.2017 with Femke http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.rigging)
provisional sketch for a workshop on “Rigging,” notes and nodes


on the notion and practice of Rig in CG
(CG as in “computational gesture”)

[title]
on Rigging and skinning: stories for cultivating creation and creatures of the industrial empire.
a practice in: rhetoric of technical reasoning in inorganic skeletal animacies.


•I begin with the position that believes in the essential ambiguity of technology
•let's look at some terms and notions and the ways they are enacted, practiced, and embodied, and to practice some hermeneutic fluency in phenomenological conditions in what we call character animation


KEYWORDS: soft bodies, skin, skinnig, Rig, Rigging, unwrapping, fold, CG, animation, locomotion, kinectics, skeleton, mechanics, interface, technology,


...................................

Rigs are about:
-ways of arranging space, time and matter : like a sentence, that sticks words sequentially together in a certain way. Rig would be a way those elements are attached to one another in time and space.
[*] --> one-dimenisional skeletal Rigs are generally intereseting for my research, because of the specific sequential order that many forms of culture take. (for example, “tradition” is from that famility of Rigs, a string of things in a particular order and not another. [---> go to totem columns]. “language” is another one.)
◦what are the degrees of flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material human-technology relations], i would ask: what are the material objects that this language commits us to? to be more exact: what are the material objects that the language-Rig commits the CG-hacker to?
-ontological assumptions embeded in any “device” (English grammar, CG Rigs, architect's tools, a definition in language, etc.)
-Rigs are clever technological provisional constructions, (always) setup for a specific naturalization.
-Rigs articulate animacies, that is to say: they are almost linguistic structures that shape or determine our animations
-Rigs do consequential work
-how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a field, narrative, text, environment, etc

whenever you give a definition (a metaphor, a concept) and work with it, and find yourself committed to certain findings, tracings and meanings because of that: you are working with a Rig. that is to say: Rigs are definitional structures, not arguments themselves, but their conditions.
then the question would be: when do you know that it is time to dismantle a Rig? how to recognize, learn to reuse or repurpose old Rigs?

in CG the business of Rigging and Rig-making is handed to the engineering talent and point of view, it has made a pure technical problem.



skeletal, it's all about the ‘arm’
http://www.toxik.sk/img/maya2011_ya.jpg
an arm is a spaciotemporal particularity
the organisms that crafted in their bodies the subphylum vertebrata, a terrestrial technology for moving the flesh.
the images we make are made in the image of the one-with-arms

mechanical
bipedal
facial
quadrupedal
many arms and legs
spinal
surficial
hair
feather

rain Rig by محمد عبدالله
eqFUnFPcuwg

an Optimus Prime transformation Rig by Eske Yoshinob
VDrAzeNS2pk?t=28

(strictly) possible tranformational arrangements

how a being is Rigged into transformational particularities
in this sense, the question of the Rig is ontoloical, specially in a world populated by devices and techniques, interfaces and folds upon folds, constructions that do things for another constructions, Rigs that translate

kinematic equations, inverse kinematics, the math of it is called the Jacobian inverse technique
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Arc-welding.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Modele_cinematique_corps_humain.svg
“In robotics, inverse kinematics makes use of the kinematics equations to determine the joint parameters that provide a desired position for each of the robot's end-effectors. Specification of the movement of a robot so that its end-effectors achieve the desired tasks is known as motion planning.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics
{\frac  {\partial p_{i}}{\partial x_{k}}}\approx {\frac  {p_{i}(x_{{0,k}}+h)-p_{i}(x_{0})}{h}}

...................................

Maya's interfacial iconograhies

...................................

how do we animate quadrupeds, invertebrates, phyla, rotifera (wheel-animals), and so on; for each a mathematics must be invented in order and terms of digital computationality.

“anatomy” is always “imaginary anatomy” (in CG, comtemporary dance, medicine, love, etc.)



a skin has to deal with:
“Global Stiffness Structural Optimization”



Rig talks to mesh, telling it how to move, how to be.
how we evolved from jelly to skelletal? something tense, intensified in space, some flesh attached to it. how the concrete mineral came back to assert itself in the terms of bones of the organism?
(a mesh is a matrix of points in which the neighboring points only matter to eachother. mesh is the result of the study of topology in mathematical notions of space and structure, with demands of an industry interested in the representation of surface. mesh is interested by creatures that have a skin, and have stakes in tactility?)
Rig is that constructed logic or grammar that allows mesh deformation in one way and not another. made of enfolded layers of code and constraint


story of the bone
the flow of matter and energy, flow of intensification between sortal processes, organisms, and minerals.


this is about how matter is defined, in everyday CG work


how certain kinetic skeletal rigs naturalize the relationships between volume and surface and skeleton --> which is always symbolic

...................................

notes by other participants of the workshop:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.sina.workshop

some post-workshop notes:

questions of:
•causality: how Rig-thinking can help to have a better understanding of causal relationships between the ‘moved’ and ‘mover’?
•control: how can we have a more interesting ontology of constraints that allows more interesting articulations of control---(that one-way flow of influence between the soft and the rigid)?
•process and becoming: how the technological nature of the Rig and its relations with the image of the organism in CG can be Rigged for a different articulation of the lived-body? and to which extend the Rig can be helpfull to think about the becoming of the beings-of-the-CG (that means: hacker + 3D model)?
•identity: How within an industry such as Pixar, deeply invested in what is a feeling and affectious living characher, a whole new set of technologies and ontologies must be made and destroyed, learned and unlearned, for a different question of identity: what is a living thing? how Rig matter in a world that is made of Rigs that make Rigs for beings to articulate themselves in, through, and with them? inventing and being invented by them
•model: animation = life; asking what brings us to life, makes us alive? (what we animate and what animates us)
•reading and space of the text: the practice we did with pop-up-book making, a joint page of a book when opened wide, the meaning and influence of the reading animates itself like a Rig, coming into movement, flow and inflow as the result of the muscular skeletal gesture of a “reader” who has two hands: mechanical animacies of the act of reading set in time and space by the “writer”
•which rigs rig rigs? (with Strathernian rhetorics) ---- Rig-making practices are ontological technological choreographies that (in the case of CG) make mesh matter*-----they are involved in ‘making mesh flesh’


[14.05.2017]

...................................

rig: a higher-level description of the motion of the part (of mesh) it is influencing (--> set of “bones” may not be hierarchical or interconnected)
[a] simplified user interface allowing animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry --> control the deformation of the mesh data (=/= imitate real anatomy or physical processes)

modern rigging = hacking (in 3D softwares)

...................................

Disney --> body-ege: feeling good about oneself

(via) the playful mastery over anthropomorphized machines


(Rickels > Hanns Sachs:) the last time machines were used for play and not work was during the time of the Greeks and Romans : culture's value of the human body ==> machine used for amusement

**narcissistic investment (of interest) in the body protects against submission to the machine** --> conceived no longer as plaything but as his own prosthetic extension

movement of fantasmatization

to fantasize aggression = to turn it around upon oneself

guild: the currency of the father function

both genders (at the beginning) are phallically aggressive when it comes to mother


Kafka and de Sade despised the body for its limitations and boundaries

body (which is always also the maternal body) comes only to its mutilation [~ skinning], rebuilding, and reanimation [rig]


body has been left behind in the wake of its media-technical range --> it can no longer be plugged back into any so-called *sensorium* or *corpus*


media --> (from the point of view of) identification with the dead [#rig #nonhuman]--> every medium acquires its only prosthetic aim on a target range of *projection* and *haunting*


media-technical innovation

3D animation indust[...]